THOMAS GRAY, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, line 36, The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson, p. 38 (1966). Originally published in 1751.

Nobody knew that [Major General James] Wolfe, reciting Grays Elegy in 1759 as he rowed up the St. Lawrence [to Quebec] the night before his death, said that he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French tomorrow, until in 1815, in Vol. VII of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, appeared a biography of its secretary, John Robison, LL. D., professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who as a young man had been a midshipman in Wolfes flotilla.Carroll A. Wilson, Familiar Small College Quotations, II: Mark Hopkins and the Log, The Colophon, spring 1938, p. 204.